Life itself is glorious.

Quotes by Jürgen Moltmann

“When the fear of death leaves us, the destructive craving for life leaves us too. We can then restrict our desires and our demands to our natural requirements. The dreams of power and happiness and luxury and far-off places, which are used to create artificial wants, no longer entice us. They have become ludicrous. So we shall use only what we really need, and shall no longer be prepared to go along with the lunacy of extravagance and waste. We do not even need solemn appeals for saving and moderation; for life itself is glorious, and here joy in existence can be had for nothing.”

Jürgen Moltmann, The Power of the Powerless

The one will triumph who first died for the victims then also for the executioners, and in so doing revealed a new righteousness which breaks through vicious circles of hate and vengeance and which from the lost victims and executioners creates a new mankind with a new humanity. Only where righteousness becomes creative and creates right both for the lawless and for those outside the law, only where creative love changes when is hateful and deserving of hate, only where the new man is born who is oppressed nor oppresses others, can one speak of the true revolution of righteousness and of the righteousness of God.”

Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology

“God allows himself to be humiliated and crucified in the Son, in order to free the oppressors and the oppressed from oppression and to open up to them the situation of free, sympathetic humanity.” – The Crucified God

“The God of freedom, the true God, is… not recognized by his power and glory in the history of the world, but through his helplessness and his death on the scandal of the cross of Jesus” TCG

“Because of Christ’s prevenient and unconditional invitation, the fellowship of the table cannot be restricted to people who are ‘faithful to the church’, or to the ‘inner circle’ of the community. For it is not the feast of the particularly righteous, of the people who think that they are particularly devout; it is the feast of the weary and heavy-laden, who have heard the call to refreshment.”

Jürgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Contribution to Messianic Ecclesiology

“When the crucified Jesus is called “the image of the invisible God,” the meaning is that THIS is God, and God is like THIS.” TCG

“The thought of death and life after death is ambivalent. It can deflect us from this life, with its pleasures and pains. It can make life here a transition, a step on the way to another life beyond – and by doing so it can make this life empty and void. It can draw love from this life and deflect it to a life hereafter, spreading resignation in ‘this vale of tears’. The thought of death and a life after death can lead to fatalism and apathy, so that we only live life here half-heartedly, or just endure it and ‘get through’. The thought of a life after death can cheat us of the happiness and the pain of this life, so that we squander its treasures, selling them off cheap to heaven. In that respect it is better to live every day as if death didn’t exist, better to love life here and now as unreservedly as if death really were ‘the finish’. The notion that this life is no more than a preparation for a life beyond, is the theory of a refusal to live, and a religious fraud. It is inconsistent with the living God, who is ‘a lover of life’. In that sense it is religious atheism”

The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology

“Ever since the beginning of the middle-class era, with its faith in progress, belief in progress has dominated the upbringing of children too. Childhood now came to be understood only as the preliminary stage on the way to the full personhood of the adult… Every lived moment has an eternal significance and already constitutes a fulfilled life. For fulfilled life is not measured by the number of years that have been lived through, or spent in one way or another. It is measured according to the depth of lived experience.” -Childhood

The longer I have lived with this new hope, the clearer it has become to me: our true hope in life doesn’t spring from the feelings of our youth, lovely and fair though they are. Nor does it emerge from the objective possibilities of history, unlimited though they may be. Our true hope in life is wakened and sustained and finally fulfilled by the great divine mystery which is above us and in us and round about us, nearer to us than we can be to ourselves. It encounters us as the great promise of our life and this world: nothing will be in vain. It will succeed. In the end all will be well! It meets us too in the call to life: ‘I live and you shall live also.’ We are called to this hope, and the call often sounds like a command – a command to resist death and the powers of death, and a command to love life and cherish it: every life, the life we share, the whole of life.”

-Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life

“The incarnation of God has really already given us a counterimage to the modern ‘human being as machine’ and to the artificial products of ‘performance’ and ‘beauty’. God became human so that we might turn from being proud and unhappy gods into true human beings,[35] human beings who can accept their youth and their age, and assent to the transitoriness of their bodies; human beings who know that life is more than performance, and that it is love which makes human beings beautiful.”

-Jürgen Moltmann, Ethics of Hope

justification of human acts of subjugation and violence maintains; `the earth is the Lord’s, and all that dwells in it’ (Ps. 24. z). Men and women can only treat what belongs to God with reverence and solicitude. If they respect God’s right of ownership to the earth, then their own rights consist simply of the right to use it. But use must preserve the integrity of property which isn’t one’s own. Otherwise it becomes usurpation. Because as creator God is present in all the beings he has created, a radiance falls on them from God’s glory, and they reflect God’s eternal light. We have to keep the life so transfigured by God holy if we human beings want to live. So we shall integrate ourselves again into the warp and weft of life’s entire fabric, from which we broke away so that we might dominate it. We shall acknowledge gratefully that we are dependent on nature, but that nature is not dependent on us; for nature was there before us and will still be- there when we have gone.